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The Dissolving Jail-Break in Margaret Avison

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The Dissolving Jail-Break in Margaret Avison University of Windsor Scholarship at UWindsor English Publications Department of English Winter 1989 The dissolving jail-break in Margaret Avison Katherine Quinsey University of Windsor Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/englishpub Part of the Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons Recommended Citation Quinsey, Katherine. (1989). The dissolving jail-break in Margaret Avison. Canadian Poetry, 25, 21-37. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/englishpub/30 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at Scholarship at UWindsor. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship at UWindsor. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Dissolving Jail-Break in Avison by K.M. Quinsey Margaret Avison's most concise statement on the faculty of imaginative vision appears in the early and darker stages of her mature career, in her most controversial poem; the thought embodied by this statement, however, flows through most of her poetry in various channels, undergoing various transformations. Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes. The optic heart must venture: a jail-break and re-creation.1 The central principles here — the equation of seeing with being; the bursting of generally- accepted boundaries of perception; and "the imagination's re-creation of the world of experience"2 — are fairly general and underlie equally the intellectual twists and questions of some poems and the celebratory imagism of others. More particularly, however, the venture/jail- break/re-creation pattern repeats itself through Avison's work, changing significantly as it does so: venture and jail-break dominate the earlier poems, often in a pattern of challenge and questioning; in the later poetry, however, altered perception is not overtly proclaimed or examined so much as it is enacted and celebrated. In the imaginative and religious re-creation taking place, the venture and jail-break themselves are radically transformed, dissolving together into an "opening-out" ("The Bible to be Believed," sunblue, p. 57). It is difficult to generalize about movements in Margaret Avison's poetry: elements of the celebration and conviction of later poems enlighten some of her early work, and "voices" of earlier scepticism and self-examination speak in her later poems.3 Moreover, as Avison herself whimsically reminds students in "Strong Yellow, for Reading Aloud" (sunblue, pp. 40-41), it is presumptuous to relate any such movement to stages in her personal religious development. This essay, then, following Avison's own principles, will not trace larger patterns of development, but rather will look carefully at four poems which embody rather different ways of understanding the jail-break, and which suggest something of its transformation. To achieve such an understanding the reader must accept the challenge presented by Avison's precise and unsettling language, recalling that she demanded "creative readers" as well as "creative writers,"4 and look through the poems as through another eye. Before approaching the poems directly, I shall review more fully some of the implications of the perceptive process as described in "Snow," implications which should be familiar to Avison students but which establish the terms of the change this discussion is intended to document. The optic heart unites sense (eye) and inner being (heart) in a multi dimensional, imaginative vision that breaks through conventional structures of perception; it includes both the "inner eye" (of "Apex Animal") and the outer, both physical and non-physical experience. Such seeing is a willed activity, done by the "I" behind the eye, "I/eye" being one of Avison's unlocking puns, identifying the optic heart with the self, the person who looks out from those eyes; throughout her work seeing is metaphorically equated with being. "Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes" — only you can do your seeing; paradoxically, however, in order to see for yourself you must venture both out of a self-centred point of view5 and out of the framework of things as seen "for" you by conventional boundaries and angles of perception, space-time coordination, categories of visual objects, and the like. This is the jail-break suggested in such early poems as "Geometaphysical" and "Perspective," and borne out in the surrealism of Winter Sun poems like "Snow" and "Jonathan, O Jonathan" (pp. 27, 30); in the later poems this self- conscious challenge to perceptual limitations gives way to a larger sense of being and life, in which the limitations have fallen away and the jail-break itself has turned inside-out. Jail-break is a risky process, however, for it always entails a kind of death; yet that death is ultimately essential to life and being — "must venture" connotes both danger and necessity. The fear inherent in the jail-break takes two forms: the fear of dissolution in leaving the security, however confining, of a self-defined world; and the paradoxical fear of being shut up in the self, unable either to absorb or to communicate the changed vision — this apprehension appears in the whirlpool of "The Swimmers Moment" and in the poet of "Chronic," sequestered in her house made of old newspapers, "failing . In credence of reality as others/Must know it" (WS/D, p. 18). Necessity can also be understood two ways: both as an unavoidable circumstance or "moment" in life to which all must come, or as a continuing demand of human existence. All must approach the perceptive precipice, and, if the leap is taken, the resulting Gopernican shift in perception pulls the flat world out from under the feet, leaving a breathless sense of insecurity; one must either abandon oneself to the flux or be destroyed by it, be flung with the sungold wheels of "Jonathan" or be crushed by them. From another angle, the imaginative act can be seen as necessary to being, fulfilling some innate demand — hence the thread of "yearning," "longing," and "hunger" which runs through Avison's work. In the larger pattern of Avison's poetry, the fear of dissolution blends paradoxically into an affirmation of re-creation. The jail-break presents Avison's version of the Gospel paradox that one must lose one's life in order to find it, and that he who tries to save his life shall lose it: clinging to conventional definitions, categories, and space-time notions — or to intellectual games and compensating fantasies — leads only to the empty shell or dead-end of despair described in "The Mirrored Man." In order to see meaning and clarity and life under the grey outlines and blur of postlapsarian existence, the seer must burst out of self-centred vision and move into other dimensions; the eye which can see the snowstorm as astonished cinders quaking with rhizomes will ultimately be able to comprehend the God who is like an uncircumferenced circle. In order to be re-created, the seer must abandon self-definition and self-enclosure to be drawn out of the self, both into the world she perceives and into the source of that world's light (as in "Ps. 19"). Frequently in Avison's later poetry perception becomes an encounter, in which seer and thing seen may change places; most often the eye participates in what it sees (William Aide says this participation exonerates Avison from the charge of "mere description"!)7 and all the being is involved in the act: My heart branches, swells into bud and spray: heart break. ("March Morning," sunblue, p. 25) Here is the jail-break without walls: not a jail-break, a conscious struggle to escape, but rather heart-break, a living openness, or a process of life-from-death. Avison's de-structuring of conventional vision does not lead to existential nausea and dead- ends, nor to pathological post-modern isolation, because it ends thus in re-creation, both of the world as imaginatively perceived and of the self that so perceives the world. This principle is most immediately demonstrated in Avison's poetic language, in the stylistic oddities of her poems, which have generally been recognized as challenging the reader's own structures of perception: she forces the imagination to work, and demands that the attentive reader accomplish the jail-break him/ herself. Time-space point of view moves through history and around the world; personal pronouns shift from first to third, the reference ambiguous; metaphor and reference blur and unite; the seer and the thing seen inter-penetrate, particularly in the later poems. Ambiguities and interruptions in syntax and diction re-create the ambiguities of experience or point to experiences beyond words: concentrated, cryptic utterances or piled-up hyphenated clusters give the impression of language being stretched over something rather too big for it, or of an attempt to convey a multiplicity of meaning and experience in which all levels are equally present and important. The surrealism of some poems, showing the world without the structure of generally-accepted categories, expectations, and physical limitations, can be terrifying and vertiginous: roofs slope and flash actively beneath sungold wheels; the poet is flung into bright air on the end of something rather like God's fishing line; the sun reflected on the ocean can explode the eyeballs, as an object of vision too powerful for ordinary seeing. (In opposition to subjectivism, Avison postulates a reality outside the self, big enough and powerful enough to overload the individual vision.) Although Avison most certainly uses convention against itself, both in her language and in the perception it embodies and promotes, her language and vision do not empty themselves of meaning but rather are "cryptic" (a key word in Avison's lexicon), packing meaning in; in another form of the dissolving jail-break, her work breaks construction open, moving beyond the deconstructive spiral into an unimaginable dimension of meaning and reference — the uncircumferenced circle of "First."8 Of the four poems I am considering, the first two embody very clearly in themselves the venture/jail-break/re-creation pattern, but do so in different ways anticipating later transformations.
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